Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  The swarm of small-hour commuters didn’t seem to be slackening, but now Rita noticed a new trend: people drifting back up the platform in ever-increasing numbers. They walked tiredly, stoop-shouldered as they climbed aboard the train. Going home, she noted. A four o’clock shift change. The train emptied out and refilled over a five-minute period. Increasingly edgy, Rita fumbled with her super-zoom, switching off the flash and diverting its output to her glasses.

  Then (taking her courage in both hands) she slowly eased the barrel lens around the corner of the building to record the last stragglers in more detail. Men and women in long woolen coats, cut almost like dusters. They wore dark clothes underneath, suits or in some cases knee breeches and hose on the men. The women wore long skirts or Indian-style shalwar outfits—side-split tunics over loose trousers. Their faces were creased and rumpled by long, sleepless working hours. Factory workers, Rita speculated. Bethlehem’s bones were built on iron and coal and the first steelworks. Was it any surprise there was heavy industry here, too?

  As the crowd thinned, she pulled back deeper into the shadows. An electric bell clanged harshly above the squeal and thud the freight train made as it crossed a sequence of points. Then the doors on the shift change train hissed shut, and with a buzzing whine it glided back the way it had come.

  Looking past the empty platform, Rita saw flatbed carriages rumbling and squealing past. Tarpaulins covered most of their loads, but there was something ominously familiar about the hunchbacked shapes beneath. A coy glimpse under a hem of oilcloth finally forced another dizzying perspective change upon her. She followed the edge of a track wrapped around a toothed drive wheel, the outline of hull, then turret and horizontal protrusion—Are those tanks? she wondered.

  “Hey! You! You missed your shift! Dinna you ken the—hey!”

  Rita spun round. It was the station mate, waddling along the platform toward her, waving. Without thinking, she’d stepped forward toward the freight train, and now he’d seen her. “Abort, abort, abort,” she said aloud, trying to ignore her stomach churn. Raised her left forearm, squeezed for the return trigger—

  “Hey, you! Let’s see your pass—”

  She jaunted in a panicky moment, falling hard onto soft grass and going over on her left hip. Falling hurt, but she pushed herself upright immediately and jaunted again, this time into an empty parking lot on the other side of the highway from her starting point.

  I blew it, she realized dismally. I totally suck at spying. And then the true implications of what she’d witnessed struck like lightning. Tanks. High-speed commuter trains. Computers. My God, what have we stumbled across?

  BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

  DR. SCRANTON: The way I read this action summary, we’re burned. She’s not going to be able to go back there again. Colonel? Anything to add?

  COL. SMITH: We learned a lot, and I’m not sure it went as badly as you think.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Yes, but our JAUNT BLUE asset was exposed! She could have been killed! As it was, she barely escaped by the skin of her—

  COL. SMITH: Nonsense. Don’t overdramatize.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: But she could have been shot!

  DR. SCRANTON: (wearily) Gentlemen. As you were saying, Colonel?

  COL. SMITH: Rita aborted the mission early, but completely in line with her instructions: do not risk confrontation, avoid exposure. The telemetry capsule auto-returned on schedule, as expected. The mission was truncated but we made a full recovery, and we learned a lot. Let me go over the pluses and minuses—

  DR. SCRANTON: Please do.

  COL. SMITH: First, the pluses. She retrieved the logs from the Mission One nomadic surveillance nodes. She released the Mission Two micro-UAV spy birds. She planted six webcams on two different manned installations. We got an invaluable look at the inside of a railroad office, and at some rolling stock—our analysts are still drooling over the take because it’s gold-dust. And she got a look, up close with a telephoto lens, at a whole bunch of railroad employees and factory workers.

  DR. SCRANTON: Analysis later.

  COL. SMITH: Okay. The minuses: we weren’t expecting the station to be busy at four in the morning, and Rita was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The stationmaster—the station office video stream shows that he wasn’t armed, so she wasn’t in immediate danger. Nevertheless, she jaunted out of there. So we’re left with a witness, singular, to a JAUNT BLUE departure at dead of night. The platform wasn’t alarmed or surveilled, so it’s a subjective eyeball account only. Which means that unless they’re aware of world-walkers they’ll probably write it off as a hallucination or a funny spell or something. So while I don’t think it’s advisable to send Rita back to the switchyard, I don’t think she’s blown. In fact, I’d recommend bringing Phase Two forward.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: What do the analysts say? What did we get out of this?

  COL. SMITH: Lots. They’ve got computer terminals in offices. Old-style cathode ray tube monitors with odd keyboards, but it’s the real thing. And they use electric traction for railroads. That commuter train Rita witnessed is a big tell—it’s an electric multiple unit with Jacobs bogies—

  DR. SCRANTON: What are those?

  COL. SMITH: It’s a special wheel layout—French and Chinese high-speed trains use them. Saves weight, but means the cars can’t be uncoupled. It’s common on passenger trains that run upward of a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Not ours, in other words.

  DR. SCRANTON: So it’s fast?

  COL. SMITH: They have a fully electrified wide-gauge railway network and use high-speed commuter trains to move people to and from industrial plants. Those low-altitude records we got from the Gnats? Lots of twelve-story buildings surrounded by foliage. The lack of suburban sprawl and highways is all consistent with a planned social housing infrastructure, built around apartment blocks and lots and lots of urban light rail.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: You mean they, they live in apartments and commute by streetcar and train?

  DR. SCRANTON: Yes. This tells us something about their financial system and economy, by the way. They’re a rent-not-buy country, so their consumer economy probably isn’t debt-backed and underwritten by an asset bubble. I mean, we might be looking at condominiums, but then we’d expect to see some McMansions as well, and suburban sprawl around highways. And we’re just not seeing that. So either they’re old-school Commies who live in state-run apartments, or they’re like Germany or Japan, hardworking savers who don’t mortgage up and whose real estate depreciates after it’s built. Possibly they’ve got state land ownership.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: That sounds pretty un-American.

  COL. SMITH: Yes. And then there was the flatbed Rita spotted. I brought a print for you.

  LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Jesus. That’s a tank … Jesus.

  COL. SMITH: A shift change at 0400 hours suggests to me that they’re working round the clock, twenty-four/seven. The webcams got us an estimated head count of four hundred and eighty workers, plus or minus twenty. Now, they might have multiple staggered shifts, but even if they’re swapping out five hundred workers every hour, that maxes out at four to six thousand in whatever factory they’re at. And that train, well, our best estimate is that it was carrying about sixty main battle tanks. M1 Abrams class or similar, judging by what was visible of their hull box size, suspension layout, and turret design. Enough to equip the core of a mechanized infantry brigade.

  DR. SCRANTON: Are they highly automated?

  COL. SMITH: We might be wrong. The munitions train might have been a coincidence—but rolling out of the vicinity of Bethlehem? Appalachian coal and iron country? If you’re going to start building heavy metal in North America, that’s one of the places you’d begin. If they’re producing tanks there and the factory only employs a few thousand people, then that implies highly efficient manufacturing. I mean, there might be other satellite stations serving t
he other side of a big complex, or maybe they run a reduced maintenance shift at night and those were the cleaners and janitors going home, but … I’m calling this a clear indicator of 1960s technology or later, just not our 1960s. We might be wrong about the housing and finance stuff, by the way. It might just be a local dorms-for-factory-workers kind of thing. We won’t know until we get boots on the ground and noses in library books. But it looks like kind of a Soviet setup to me. Paranoid and heavily armed with nuclear weapons.

  DR. SCRANTON: Okay, Colonel. Now here’s a leading question: if this was your show, where would you want to take it? Feel free to brainstorm, I’m open to ideas …

  COL. SMITH: Well, I don’t think we’re going to learn much more that’s useful by having Rita stumble around a switchyard at night. For one thing it’s dangerous, and for another, we got what we came for. What we need now is cultural intelligence—all the little details our future agents will need to operate in place. We also need large scale SIGINT and ELINT snooping programs, but that’s a job for the National Reconnaissance Office. I imagine they’ve got ARMBAND-equipped spysats with capsule return systems like the old Keyhole series, or some equivalent. But we probably want to hold off on lobbing heavy metal into orbit until we know if these people have satellites of their own—we don’t want to set off World War Three by accident. It’s going to have to happen sooner or later if we plan to engage with them, but not yet. In the meantime, I’d strongly recommend pushing Phase Two: maybe into Philly proper. The social housing thing raises an added risk factor—fewer safe houses where agents won’t be under scrutiny from the neighbors—but we’ve got enough video that our wardrobe department say they can knock off a costume that will stand up at a distance. And thanks to the webcams we should have enough dialogue for Linguistics to start working up a training kit in a week or so. And we can iterate. It gets riskier from here on in, but Rita’s resourceful. As long as we give her as much support as she wants and as much elbow room as she needs, she’ll do fine.

  DR. SCRANTON: Right. So tell me how we’re going to do it.

  END TRANSCRIPT

  Shell Game

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Rita jaunted back into the real world, as she still thought of it, at seven minutes past four in the morning. By four forty she’d been through a decontamination shower, a medical check, three blood samples, and a humiliatingly random piss test. (Apparently someone was worried she’d spent her hour in the BLACK RAIN time line cranking up on crystal meth: the war on drugs might have ended in an armistice, but government employment regulations took a dim view of using recreational pharmaceuticals on the job.) So when Patrick materialized and shoved a steaming mug of Starbucks into her hand, it came as a blessed relief—until he shook his head. “Save it for the debriefing committees,” he murmured.

  “Committees, plural?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh hell. Sorry.”

  They let her take off her body armor and extract herself from the rat’s nest of biomonitor electrodes before they sat her down and grilled her for eight hours. Her interrogators took shifts in strict rotation: Patrick and the Colonel, first and fastest, then two teams of suits from Maryland, one to perform due diligence and oversight on the Unit’s reportage, and the other to perform due diligence on the due-diligence checkers. Patrick and the Colonel wanted her to walk them through her telemetry feed and provide commentary, giving them insights into why she’d done particular things. Suit Team One wanted to walk her through their checklist instead, and Suit Team Two seemed to want her to walk them through Suit Team One’s checklist, while demonstrating all the flexibility of a gang of incredibly advanced animatronic department store mannequins.

  Back in college old Prof. Hanshaw had explained the Second Artist Effect to her class: “The first artist paints the landscape they see with their own eyes. The second artist paints what they see in the first artist’s exhibition. They can’t show you a true representation, because they never saw the real thing in the first place.” This, Rita was beginning to feel, was as true for intelligence operations as for any other art form—and so she spent a weary morning and early afternoon regurgitating endlessly chewed-over morsels of data for the third- and fourth-string hacks to squabble over.

  The worst part of it all was that they mostly seemed to be intent on undermining each other, or the Unit’s reporting, by digging dirt. She half expected one of the Men in Gray to stand up suddenly, point an emotional, accusatory claw at her, and denounce her as a double agent in the pay of Moscow Central. Or perhaps they were hoping to accuse her of summoning imps to sour milk, or of not complying with federal standards for hand sanitizer application during her restroom breaks. If only they knew, she told herself hopelessly, cleaving to the memory of the smell of the nape of Angie’s neck in the early hours as if it was an anchor cable to reality.

  At two in the afternoon, Colonel Smith broke in to rescue her. He’d enlisted reinforcements. Dr. Scranton trailed behind, her poker face frozen—like a thin rind of ice covering a lake of viciously dry amusement—as she sent the brigade of second-guessers scattering like tenpins. “Ah, Ms. Douglas.” She nodded to Rita. “Ladies and gentlemen”—she glanced at the Suits from Maryland—“you’ve had your fun. Ms. Douglas, if you’d come with me, please?”

  She turned and stalked away without waiting. The Colonel hung back and ran interference while Rita apologized to the swarm of third-tier interrogators and hotfooted it after the doctor. “Sorry about that,” Scranton said offhandedly, then paused for Colonel Smith to catch up. “You were right, Eric.”

  “Right?” Rita echoed.

  “You were being nibbled to death by…” Smith mopped his brow with a tissue. “What are those fish they use for pedicures? Doctor fish?”

  “Diffusion of responsibility meets infighting,” said Scranton. “Well, we left you in the pedicure pool for eight hours, until you were nice and wrinkled. They can’t complain about being denied access.”

  “This is a rescue?” Rita yawned, too enervated to raise a hand and cover her mouth.

  “First you came to the attention of important people, then you delivered an unexpected result.” Scranton shrugged: her elegant suit jacket’s shoulders rose as if padded with kevlar. Chanel couture for a D.C. bureaucratic quarterback. “They were bound to go apeshit looking for anything they can use as leverage. Do you think they found anything, Eric?”

  The Colonel looked, if not haggard, then perhaps somewhat stale. He, too, must have been on the go since yesterday evening, Rita realized. “Not really, but that won’t stop them trying to mix it. We’ll just have to outrun them,” he said. “My office, please. We should keep this quiet.”

  “What’s this about?” Rita asked, trudging after him as he led the way to the elevators.

  “Phase Two.”

  The Colonel’s temporary office was a business suite on the top floor of the hotel building. An open door led to a bedroom. The main room was dominated by a conference table, a sofa suite, and a kitchenette where a coffee filter machine burbled welcomingly. Rita sank into a recliner and tried not to let her eyes close prematurely. Dr. Scranton took the sofa to her left, and spoke: “We’re going to have to get rid of the leeches before they suck us dry.”

  “I don’t really understand,” Rita complained.

  The Colonel placed a mug of coffee on the occasional table in front of her. “You’re not supposed to. Do you want to bring her up to speed, boss? Or shall I?”

  “Huh. Allow me.” Dr. Scranton waited while he fetched her a coffee—What kind of person has the equivalent of a Major General doing the fetching and carrying anyway? Rita wondered. “We live and work in a panopticon, Rita. Everything you do, every breath you take, someone’s watching over you. It’s the price of doing business in a security state. The trouble is, you can be running a nice tight ship and if it suddenly starts delivering results, well, all those eyeballs turn inward. And their owners all start trying to figure an angle th
at’ll let them take the credit for a job well done.”

  “But you’re—” Rita struggled to sit upright. You’re a deputy undersecretary of state! she wanted to shout. What are you even doing here? “Why are you getting involved? Isn’t this below your level?”

  “Eric petitioned me to help with leech detachment duty. You’ve waded into a swamp full of bloodsuckers and you can’t reasonably do your job if you’re carrying passengers. But nobody likes a rogue operation. So this week we’re making sure that all the would-be stakeholders get a good look at the Unit, up close and personal. Then after they’ve had a look inside I’m going to slam the door in their face so that Eric can lock it down and get everything back on course.”

  She slid an etiolated, almost skeletal hand into her handbag and extracted a white cylinder, raised it to her lips, and sucked, hard. A blue LED glowed at its tip. “The stakes are escalating. Too high for this penny-ante house politics bullshit. My boss, he says his boss is counting on you. And the buck stops on her desk, in the Oval Office.”

  Rita watched, eyes glazed, as Dr. Scranton exhaled a stream of bone-white smoke. The undersecretary leaned back, then addressed Colonel Smith.

  “The core need-to-know cell is going to be restricted as tightly as possible. Minimum threat surface. You will nominate a team of no more than four bodies to generate internal disinformation under top-secret classification. They will manufacture falsified mission transcripts and reports from Rita to support the appearance that operations in BLACK RAIN are proceeding nominally. Transcripts to be seeded with randomized tells in each distribution, so that your people can trace leakers. If any leaks are identified, those responsible will be either turned—if there’s an organization behind them and they are cooperative—or detained incommunicado.”